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Friday 17 January 2025

Welcome to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Fourth Edition. Some sample entries appear below. Click here for the Introduction; here for the masthead; here for Acknowledgments; here for the FAQ; here for advice on citations. Find entries via the search box above (more details here) or browse the menu categories in the grey bar at the top of this page.

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Parker, E Frank

(? - ) UK industrial research chemist, editor of the Fanzine Beyond, and author of a short Space Opera, Girl in Trouble (August 1943 Beyond as "The Stolen Spaceship"; 1944 chap). [JC]

Pseudonym of the unidentified UK author (? -? ) of The Amber City: Being Some Account of the Adventures of a Steam Crocodile in Central Africa (1888), a Jules-Verne-like excursion narrated by the protagonist, Thomas Vetch, who takes his flying ship into a mild-mannered African Lost World where people live in houses built of amber. [JC]

Brooks, Max

(1972- ) US scriptwriter and author who became known as a writer for Saturday Night Live in 2001-2003; his The Zombie Survival Guide (2003) – a nonfiction Satire of survivalist tracts, containing "documentary" scenarios based on Zombie attacks from pre-history to the present – is as engaging as its title. He is best known for World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War ...

Traveller

Role Playing Game (1977). Game Designers' Workshop (GDW). Designed by Marc Miller. / Traveller is the most commercially successful science fiction Role Playing Game to date, as well as one of the first. The game was developed in an unusual way; after the publication of the initial rules and supplements, much additional work was done by other companies such as FASA and ...

Coulthart, John

(1962- ) UK artist, author, designer and illustrator, perhaps best known for his various collaboration with David Britton in the Lord Horror sequence, in which a savagely scatological black Alternate History of the twentieth century culminates in a World War Two dominated by Lord Horror, a grotesque Parody of the English traitor ...

Clute, John

(1940- ) Canadian critic, editor and author, in the UK from 1969; married to Judith Clute from 1964, partner of Elizabeth Hand since 1996. He began to publish work of genre interest with an sf-tinged poem "Carcajou Lament" in Triquarterly for Winter 1960 [ie Autumn 1959]; he began consistently publishing sf reviews in his "New Fiction" column for the Toronto Star (1966-1967), and later in ...